


He and You

by pastel_x_tea



Category: Total Drama (Cartoon)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Mild Gore, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Rigid Format, Writing Exercise, and especially not in rigid format, but here it is anyway, chapter two is finally done!!! and it only took (checks watch) approximately forever, even though you guys had no clue what I was talking about with this plot, longer explanation at the end of chapter one, nobody asked for angst of total drama, so if any of you see this i love you, thanks to the people in the beej server by the way, yall really helped me out formatting wise and by reassuring me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-07-28 12:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20063698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pastel_x_tea/pseuds/pastel_x_tea
Summary: He and you had a special connection from the moment you laid eyes on one another. He lost control. You were powerless. And neither of you expected everything to end so quickly.A rigid format fic. In chapter one, each sentence will begin with “you” (or your, you’re, you’ll, etc.). In chapter two, each sentence will begin with “he” (or him, he’d, he’s, etc.).





	1. You

You row across a sea of sludge on a tiny plastic bubble, defying every odd of chemistry and physics alike by sheer force of will. You don’t look back, you have to push forward, you _have_ to. You tune out the yelling and jeering in the background, the couple’s bickering, Chris shouting (like you haven’t been tuning that out all season). You tune out the sharp sound of a SNAP! shouting its way up to you from your opponent below.

You don’t tune out the scream.

You’ve never heard anything like it before. You felt it in your stomach, yanking you sharply to turn and look. You felt it rattle in your head, a brief staccato of pure agony before the choke. You don’t know if the choke was from how quickly he sank below the slime, or that his body simply... didn’t have time to get anything else out.

You wait. You wait. You wait. You wait. You wait. You wait. You wait. You wait. You...

... you didn’t know bones could _bubble_.

You feel hours in the span of mere seconds as the world seems to freeze around you. You don’t remember sinking to the ground, but apparently you’re in the dirt, and a scream that isn’t yours is wailing from your sore throat. You try to wake up. You must be having one big nightmare, you must be dreaming, you couldn’t have seen what you just saw. You couldn’t have lost it, you couldn’t have lost him. You watch the sun mercilessly continuing to glare overhead and realize that everything just got very, very real.

You’re wrapped up in a shock blanket. You only remember that, thinking back, not the time in between. You must’ve been in the dirt for hours before the emergency helicopters swooped down onto the scene- futile at that point, you thought. You’re clutching the crunchy silver blanket and staring out at the sprawling forest without seeing anything. You don’t hear the sirens, but you know Chris is gone, gone for good now, liability waivers be damned. You don’t get any comfort from this shiny cocoon, but it’s the best you’ve got... well, it’s all you’ve got. You look at your distorted reflection in the Mylar mirror and remember your birthday months prior. You’d received so many balloons from him that you felt like you could fly. You’d kept them in your room until all the life had left them, and then folded them away neatly to keep, a happy memory of such a beautiful day. You burst into tears again, and the world is watching.

You watch them fish what remains of him out of the waste.

Your parents embrace you as soon as you land at the airport. You don’t hug back, for the first time in your entire life. You don’t hug back. Your arms hang limp at your sides, you rest your head on your mother’s shoulder and barely breathe. You know they know, you know everybody knows. And you feel them look upon you with a suffocating pity. You even sense this from Alejandro and Heather, vile villains who had never quite cared for you before this moment. You think they must’ve had it worse; they were so close to where he was, they watched closely as he sank, they watched him come up with nothing... but you know they think the same of you. You see it in their eyes as they look back at you before collecting their bags and walking out in somber silence.

You have it the worst.

You lie in bed for days, it’s all you do. You’ve become quite acquainted with your slowly spinning ceiling fan and your walls, the plain, unseen backdrops to the images replaying themselves in your mind. Your parents expect nothing more of you. Your parents bring you food and take it away after you’ve nibbled on it. Your parents cry outside your room, wondering with crushing guilt why they ever sent you away to “summer camp” in the first place, praying for their happy girl to come back into their arms and see the sunlight again.

You don’t hear them cry over the scream.

You’ve become an unwilling patron to a sickly internal theater, showing one film on repeat for eternity. You’re locked into your seat, unable to turn away or cover your ears, scrambling for any reprieve as you watch everything slip away from you over and over and over again. You don’t always mind the flashbacks as much, though- the nightmares are worse.

You’re no longer a level above, back turned, blissfully ignorant of the moment ahead. You’re fighting him for the pole fiercely, begging him not to jump. You’re down on your knees, watching him dissolve on the surface, reaching out a hand, desperately shouting a name he no longer knows. You’re overwhelmed with the sick smell of burning and a disgusting cacophony of cracks as you hear him scream to save him, save him, save him. You can never save him. You never could.

“You need to acknowledge that,” your psychiatrist says, tapping her pen against her lips as she wears the same look of pity you’ve seen hundreds of times. “You need to keep telling yourself it’s not your fault. You need to keep reminding yourself that there wasn’t anything in the world you could do for him. You know that, deep down.” You know she’s trying her best. You don’t understand how she can’t see that you’re doing your best, too.

You start on medication, watching the dose crawl up and up and up over time. You remember him taking medication for his traumas, too, and offhandedly wonder if you may be on the same one. You could always sympathize with him, but you had never known what it was like to feel the same things until now. You think now on the long, long nights of video calls and message strings, sometimes with him, sometimes with a concerned alter. You’d comforted him, took the edge off where the medications couldn’t, wished to reach through the screen to hold him and wipe his tears and sit with him in silence, letting him sob and shudder until the storm passed. You believe he would’ve done the same for you. You’re sometimes comforted by this thought, but sometimes, it feels like you’re lying with a ghost on your restless nights.

Your psychiatrist brings up an interesting proposition. “You won’t want to do this,” she confesses, “but it may help you to receive some closure and move forward.” You make confessions of your own. You divulge that you still see his bones in your dreams after all this time, but that there are blissful, merciful nights that you see only darkness as you sleep. You still hear the scream, but it’s no longer the soundtrack to your daily routine. You can walk down the street or watch a movie or even sit in total silence without constantly hearing his final choking breath. You confess your fear: that all of this means you’re just forgetting him, letting him disintegrate from your mind just as he disintegrated that day. You feel like you’re killing him all over again.

“You’ll never forget him,” she reassures, and this brings you both comfort and dread. “You’re just shedding the bad memory of him, like your mind is finally able to break from its cocoon. You know that when you think of him, he wouldn’t want you to think of Mal, and of the way he died. You know how much it would hurt him to see you like this.”

You do.

You set off from home the same evening. You drive through the night, through the day, and through the night again. You wake up in your car at the break of dawn, refreshed from a night of pure, forgiving darkness behind your eyes. You hear his scream as you emerge from your car, and again as you’re ascending the hill. You sense it far away from you, far away from here, a distant echo.

You come upon his headstone at the peak, secluded in the peaceful shade of a lone tree. You hadn’t been able to bring yourself here before today; a headstone weighed so heavy upon your mind, an anchor to the reality of the situation. You’re glad you’re here now to see it. You lie in the sun with him as it slowly ascends above the horizon, painting the two of you a personal show of pinks and oranges streaking across the sky. You bask in the light dancing through the tree leaves with him, allowing yourself to think that were he here, the sun would be caressing his face as he caressed yours, the two of you bright and lovely and warm together. You hadn’t allowed yourself to think of what could be until this moment, not fully, anyway. You no longer feel the cold chill of a ghost as you imagine him here with you. You instead feel a warm sort of melancholy as you remind each other of your love, you by sitting silently by his side and him by softly swaying the trees for you, wrapping you in the breeze of the beautiful summer days he loved so much.

You stay until the hot afternoon sun pelts down on you from above. You find it so hard to say goodbye, even as home calls you back with open arms, but you know it’s not always goodbye. You share his scream, his agony, even on this beautiful bittersweet day, but as it fades into an echo you realize that it’s only the tiniest piece of what the two of you will always have together. You’ll always share the sun and the moon with him, the sweet memory of celebratory sundaes and the teenage thrill of sneaking a peck on the cheek or breaking away from the crowd for a brief moment, just the two of them. You know that nothing can ever truly take him away, so long as you can still see the light shimmering on a fresh morning dew, or a red bird softly perched on a treetop. You see him. You see light.

You kiss your hand and press it just above his name, leaving a slight red mark of his favorite lipstick, the tube you haven’t touched since that day. You turn up the dirt with caution and entrust him with the broken wooden necklace you leave there, deep in the green grass he now calls home. You linger with him for a moment, promising that you will be back to see the sunrise here with him another day.

You move on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you guys liked this (or, the half of it you've seen so far). Rigid format fics are a really cool thing I recently found out about and I really like doing them as writing exercises. Usually, I don't finish them and they just serve to warm me up for the normal-format stories, but this one I finished and decided to publish as well as make a second part too! If you guys like rigid format from me, and want to see more, you can always suggest to me formatting ideas (e.g. writing without a specific letter or word, a certain word number, a random set of words I have to find a way to interject into the fic, etc.) I'm down for a challenge!


	2. He

He liked to wake you up in the morning.

He was a morning person, and waking you up was the highlight of his day. He knew, of course, that _you_ were a morning person too; sometimes, you’d be up-and-at-‘em before his message even came through. He always sent his message anyway, letting you know that he was awake and was thinking of you. He might send you an animal video which reminded him of you, a photo of his breakfast, or a silly selfie, but often, even a small “Good morning” with a heart or a smile would be enough. He loved you strongly and constantly, and he would make sure you didn’t forget it.

He didn’t miss a day even when the others were fronting. He, you imagine, would pester the alter with the front until they begrudgingly pulled out his phone to send you a message, perhaps an update on who you were speaking to at the time. He probably even taught Chester to use the phone for this purpose, and that thought had always made you laugh. He (or he, he, he, or she) made sure that they always got through to that single, all-encompassing _you_ in each of their heads.

He sent you

Messages like

This, one after the

Other.

He didn’t intend

To blow up your phone, but

He would often break his sentences

Into smaller parts out of excitement to

Press ‘send’.

He’d make your phone buzz

And buzz

And buzz

Until it fell from your chair

And you dove 

Giggling 

Beneath the couch

To grab it.

He regaled you with the tales of his day as well, and you felt as if you were there with him. He dutifully described every detail, branching his stories off hundreds of times into minor connected tales until he’d gone on for hours without even getting to what he’d had for lunch. He had a way of enthralling you in even the most mundane of days, to light up the gray skies and scatter the clouds just for you. He made you fall in love with him just a bit more on each word, no matter how garrulous.

He ended each of his video calls with a sheepish smile and a wave that didn’t cease until you’d hung up. He ended his nights with a cavalcade of blue hearts to you, reminding you that you were the last thing he thought of before he went to sleep. His ends didn’t feel like ends at all, and every time you thought of him, it seemed to stretch out forever, an endless and sunny expanse.

He was the population of one in your dreams, and in those moments he felt as close as he did on the island. He wrapped his arms around you, warm and comfortable and made just for you to snuggle into. He ran his fingers through your hair, your head lying against his beating chest, your legs tangled with his, together in a fantasy. His kisses tasted like caramel, and you woke up with the sweetness still lingering on your lips, floating through the morning on the daydream of what it’d _really_ be like when you finally had your lips on his.

He’d be pleased, you thought, that you remembered these little details of him. He chewed his nails when he was nervous. He loved blue raspberry slushies and Saturday morning cartoons. He wore bright yellow pajamas with little white buttons that would somehow always manage to be buttoned crooked.

He changed.

He changed, but you barely thought about that now. His differences- well, they weren’t really _his_ differences, were they?- were the furthest thing from your mind, from a combination of repression, sheer force of will, and their… overall unimportance. His system’s darkest fiber only briefly reared its head in the beautiful woven tapestry your lives intertwined had created. It was a small chapter of your time together, and an even smaller sliver of his life as a whole; in the sun spot of his life where one could bask for hours in its iridescence, it was a passing fleck of shade from a cloud led astray.

He was just… Mike. He only ever knew how to be Mike. He was the only thing on your mind when you thought back on him, on your time, on his life. His death, even, was inconsequential to your perception of him. He was still everywhere, still Mike, and you found him so beautifully alive again and again each day.

He was in the sky, breeze softly caressing you and playing twirling games with your hair, sun warming your skin and glinting off the eyes he had told you he could stare into for hours. He was in the gentle song of a bird, so often overlooked in the bustling of life, but so easy to get enraptured in if you only took the time to listen for it. He was in the warmth in your hands of a hot drink on a cold day, in the familiar smell of a favorite shirt or a field of your favorite flowers, in the smile of a child and the curiosity of a learner and the lovely wisps of daydreams that would sweetly possess your mind in times of boredom. He was present in the good, but understood the bad, and he was there in the comfort and security of your blankets and pillows on the days you needed to cry about him, or Mal, or the world. He was still there, even if only to you, if you only remembered on the dark days where to find him.

He was nowhere. He was everywhere. He was yours, and until the end of time, that would be all that mattered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew. This is finally done! I know it's not as popular as some of my other works, and I'll be the first to admit it's not always my best writing (a lot due to the limitations of rigid format), but I really appreciate people reading it and sticking with it and giving it a chance. I love rigid format and it's really helped me get out of writer's block. Again, I'm always open to taking on a challenge, so if you guys would like to give me one, I'll do my best to fill it!


End file.
